FWIW, I believe that the issue of Obama’s personal radicalism, including his collaboration with radical, America-hating Leftists, should have been disqualifying. McCain has not exploited it well, to say the least, but even if he had been more adept, the mainstream media’s all but formally declared campaign for Obama would have made it tough to get traction. There’s enough of a goldmine there that a better candidate, less worried about criticism from elites who are in the tank for Obama anyway, could have made it sing. But McCain is McCain.

In any event, the time when the issue could have broken into public consciousness big time was during the Democratic primaries, before the media circled the wagons around the eventual nominee. As I’ve argued before, the candidate who should have been able to make hay was Hillary Clinton. Though a longtime Leftist, she sought to reconstruct herself (and the Clinton legacy) as centrist New Democrat. Among the candidates, she alone had enough influential Democrats in her corner that she might have been able to face down the party’s hard-Left activists, who are so consequential in choosing the nominee and who would have been outraged by an attack on Obama’s radicalism.

But ultimately, Hillary couldn’t pull it off, precisely because she is a longtime Leftist. As a young law student and lawyer, she was a radical herself (indeed, she is said to have met and admired Saul Alinsky, who was dead by the time Obama mastered his philosophy). More importantly, her husband pardoned both FALN terrorists (an appeal to Puerto Ricans in New York in order to help her senate bid), and, more significantly for present purposes, two Weather Underground terrorists. As a result, when in late inning desperation Hillary finally brought up Obama’s Ayers connection during a debate, Obama effectively slammed her with the pardons — effectively ending all discussion of Obama’s radicalism in the primaries.

I recount all this because of Mike Klonsky, another self-professed communist with whom Obama collaborated and about whom I wrote today. There was an interesting fact I didn’t mention in the article. On the website of the Small Schools Workshop — the Klonsky/Ayers venture into which Obama helped pour nearly $2M in funding — there are bios of some of the key players. Klonsky’s is here. Although he mentions neither his SDS days with Ayers nor his founding of the Communist Party (Marxist Leninist), he does note the following among his accomplishments: “Dr. Klonsky was named to President Clinton’s Advisory Panel on School Violence.”

Contrary to the studious remaking of their image, the Clintons could never put any real daylight between themselves and Obama when it came to radicalism. They are part of the media-Democrat establishment that for years admired, collaborated with, and cleaned up the image of the Sixties renegades — so they could spread their revolution in ways that were less patent than their prior methods, though more destructive. And if we end up with a President Obama, the Clintons will be a big part of the reason why.